Training plays an important role in the development of various fields such as education, business etc. The most common way of training is teaching through books or notebooks, pamphlets and other written material, which contain printed or written form of subject matter. Such printed material, once printed or written in the form of books etc, cannot be edited manually. Further, it is difficult to correct or add additional matters to such printed material. It also becomes difficult to provide interactive training sessions using such printed material.
Therefore training techniques are being developed involving computers and different computer related applications for presenting various subject matters. Thus, organizations are increasingly adopting e-learning. This has fueled the demand for current and relevant e-learning content.
To cater to the growing demand for e-learning content, organizations are adopting rapid authoring tools. Rapid authoring tools enhance the productivity of content authors, and reduce the time and cost per hour of e-learning content over conventional programming-oriented tools. Rapid authoring tools employ ready-made templates for course overview, content page layout, course navigation, questions, tests, glossary, score report and such other course elements.
One impediment to this push for rapid authoring tools comes from learners themselves. They describe their learning experience resulting from rapid authoring tools as a non-engaging, boring, page-turning activity. This results in low attention and high instances of non-completion. Clearly this is undesirable.
The solution to this problem is the use of what is known in the art as interactivity. The learner is kept engaged and actively participating in the learning experience. Interactivity is embedded in an electronic course, and uses graphics, text, sound animation etc. to stimulate action. Further, interactivity elicits user actions using input devices such as mouse, keyboard etc and provides a feedback response. Traditionally, interactive schemes are generally designed and developed using various programming languages known. For example, a programmer may develop an interactive program in a training module that allows a user to pick and drag various country-flags and drop them at their respective country locations. These programs may be developed using tools like JAVA, FLASH etc. However, there are several disadvantages to this approach.
First of all, the trainer needs to think of an ‘interactivity’ appropriate to the learning goal and subject matter at hand. This involves thinking effort with little or no head-start.
Next, the trainer needs to explain the interactivity to a programmer so that he or she could build that interactivity using relevant programming tools and put it into the training module. If the trainer wants to put some other interactive element in the same module, he or she may have to call the programmer once again to get the task done. Thus, each time there is a requirement of one or more programmers or experts who are able to develop such interactive modules through programming languages or codes.
Another problem concerns modifications. A teacher or a trainer or any other person not skilled in the art of programming may not be able to modify his/her interactivity in the training module. Even if the teacher or trainer were able to do the required programming, it is still a significant cost and time overhead.
Another problem associated with programming is debugging. A person skilled in handling one language may not be able to diagnose and debug problems occurring in an application designed and implemented in another language.
Therefore a need exists for a system and a method for creating and customizing interactivity wherein the need of programmers may be avoided.